Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates announced in Paris on Monday a multi-billion-dollar effort by 28 private investors to support companies with clean energy ideas, bring new technologies to market, and spur development of alternatives to the fossil fuel economy.

Gates made his announcement flanked by President Obama, France’s President Francois Hollande and India’s Premier Narendra Modi. He said investors have so far committed $2 billion to what is called the Breakthrough Energy Coalition. They are prepared to spend $7 billion.

“We need to be exploring many different paths, and that means we also need to invent new approaches: Private companies will ultimately develop these energy breakthroughs, but their work will rely on the kind of basic research that only governments can fund. Both have a role to play,” Gates wrote in a blog post.

Twenty countries have agreed to participate in the program, called Mission Innovation, by doubling investment in zero and low-carbon research. “The leap forward is going to take private sector efforts: If we put our best minds behind it and we have the dollars behind it, we will discover what works,” Obama said at the announcement.

Investors in the Breakthrough Energy Coalition include Gates, Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com; Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook; Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Atlantic; George Soros, the philanthropist; and Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia. The participating countries include the U.S., Saudi Arabia, France, India, Canada, Chile, Norway, South Korea, the United Arab Emirates and Australia.

The 28 investors, a group that includes the University of California, have a collective worth of between $300 billion and $400 billion.

As Gates announcement his initiative in Paris, however, a bevy of Seattle activist groups were marching on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation offices in Seattle, and delivering petitions demanding that the foundation divest its holdings in coal and oil company stocks.

The foundation has sharply reduced those investments over the past two years, but still holds about $1.4 billion in energy stocks. It has has ignored demonstrations at its doorstep.

Investing is not enough, argued former Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn. “Our goal is not just reducing costs of alternatives (energy sources) but increasing the cost of fossil fuels,” McGinn said. “We have to recognize that we have been subsidizing fossil fuels.”

The Rev. Jenny Phillips, representing the United Methodist Church, celebrated Gates’ “incredible commitment” to develop alternative energy, and his “vision and power to transform the world.” What’s still needed, she argued, is a “moral miracle” that would come from disinvestment.

Ex-Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn: “Our goal is not just reducing costs of alternatives but increasing the cost of fossil fuels.”

“Money is an important force in this world, perhaps more than any time in the past,” added Bruce Herbert, CEO of Newground Social Investment.

The 28 investors and 20 countries in Paris said they will deploy money to drive down costs and increase availability of solar and wind energy.”The pace of innovation and the scale of transformation and dissemination remain significantly short of what is needed,” they said.

The investors pledged to “invest early, invest broadly, invest boldly, invest wisely (and) invest together. The “poorest parts of the world require an aggressive global program for zero-emission energy innovation,” they argued.

The United States has shown that rapid development of clean energy sources is possible. It generates 20 times as much solar energy as was the case as recently as 2008.

“The renewable technologies we have today, like wind and solar, have made a lot of progress and could be one path to a zero carbon energy future,” Gates aid in his blog post.

“But given the scale of the challenge, we need to be exploring many different paths — and that means we need to invent new approaches. Our primary goal with the coalition is as much to accelerate progress on clean energy as it is to make a profit.”

Zuckerberg, in a Facebook post, added: “Solving the clean energy problem is an essential part of building a better world . . . Yet progress toward a sustainable energy system is too slow and the current system doesn’t encourage the kind of innovation that will get us there faster.”

The investors’ announcement came at the beginning of a 12-day United Nations-sponsored climate summit, at which nations will seek to hammer out specific new policies and targets to limit emissions of greenhouse gases which cause global warming.